Paradise Cove

by Jenny Holiday

  “You can’t not charge me!”

  “Consider it a welcome-to-town gift.”

  She started to protest, but Eve chimed in. “Sawyer and Jake are basically this town’s fairy godfathers. Sawyer in a professional capacity, of course, but Jake is always fixing stuff or building stuff.”

  “Yeah,” Maya agreed. “Like, if you ever need the back of a wardrobe surgically removed, Jake’s your man.”

  Well, busted. He figured he had the time and he had the skills. And he hated seeing a job that needed doing sit undone.

  Which was how he found himself signed up to build a deck for Nora Walsh, aka Dr. Hon, aka the pixie doctor.

  It occurred to him that he sure had a lot of names for someone he barely knew.

  As she unlocked her car, Nora’s head was spinning. So many new faces and names. So much talking. Well, except for Jake. The interesting thing was that everyone accommodated his silence. It was like they expected it, like it didn’t register as out of the ordinary. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he’d just always been that way.

  This head spinning was not necessarily a bad thing, though. Nora felt…not happy exactly, but hopeful. Like maybe she’d turned a corner. This week she’d made huge progress on the clinic, gotten most of the important furniture into her new place, and finished things by hanging out at a bar with a bunch of people who seemed like they might become friends.

  And she’d discovered that Law and his smoky oven made the best pizza she had ever tasted. Even Maya, who clearly was not a fan of Law’s, agreed, judging by how she’d kept stealing pieces off Nora’s plate and making secret little moaning noises when Law wasn’t looking.

  Nora thought back to last weekend, after her haircut, when she’d been hit with a wave of loneliness.

  What was loneliness, really? She didn’t mind being alone. She often enjoyed it, in fact, and sometimes craved it. And if the alternative to loneliness was the kind of sublimation of the self she’d gradually done the last few years, eating sushi instead of pizza with Rufus, taking his shifts when he had a concert he wanted to go to, nodding in agreement when he suggested it was vital that they spend eleven thousand dollars on a sofa, she’d take loneliness any day.

  All she knew was she felt better for her night of conversation at the bar. She was starting to wonder if what she’d missed, after a week of working around the clock, was caring about other people’s stories. Having them care about hers. For example, she had listened to Maya talk excitedly about how a kid in her summer camp had overcome his stage fright. And Maya had laughed her head off when Nora whisperingly told her why she had decided to order the night’s special pizza, which was prosciutto, ricotta, and…shaved parsnips.

  “Usually I’m a sucker for Hawaiian pizza, which I notice is on the menu, but I couldn’t pass on the parsnips,” Nora had said.

  Maya had made an exaggerated choking noise. “Oh no! I was starting to like you, and then you went and ruined it by wanting pineapple on pizza!”

  Nora liked Maya. Her expansive theatricality was amusing, and she offered a kind of friendly intimacy that was sudden but seemingly genuine.

  So yeah, maybe Nora was a little less lonely tonight as she was taking her first tentative steps into the next phase of her life.

  Her phone, in her back pocket, buzzed. It had been on silent, but she’d set it to vibrate, and her butt had been buzzing a lot while she’d been at the bar. She slid into the car and had a look.

  Rufus. A bunch of texts and a voice mail.

  Nice. Just when she’d been thinking maybe she’d started to turn a corner.

  The maddening thing about Rufus was that even though he was the one who’d nuked their relationship, he kept wanting to talk about it. And not even in a groveling I’m-sorry-please-take-me-back sort of way. Not that she would have. It was more him constantly wanting to explain how he felt. They’d met during their residencies—he’d been in his final year, and she’d been in her first. But now that they were staff physicians and had less demanding schedules, he felt neglected. He felt the need for a partner he had more shared interests with. He felt they spent too much time with her family. He felt, he felt, he felt.

  And, worse, he wanted to explain how she should feel: “You deserve more than I can give you.”

  He wanted to regulate her reaction to the whole thing, was what it came down to. He wanted to get away with it, but he didn’t want her to hold a grudge.

  How had she loved such an insecure, manipulative man?

  Because she had loved him.

  Did she still love him? She didn’t even know anymore. It didn’t feel like she did, but she also questioned if it was possible to stop loving someone at the drop of a hat—even if they did something terrible.

  But that wasn’t even the worst of it. Hearts were vulnerable. People gave them to the wrong people all the time. It wasn’t pleasant, but it happened. But she had done more than that. Done worse than that. She had gradually migrated her tastes, her interests, her free time, to align with Rufus’s. Not on purpose. Mostly because she genuinely hadn’t cared about the hand mixer or the sofa, so it had been easier to go along with what he wanted. So the whole “We don’t have shared interests” thing was kind of rich.

  But she did care about pizza. And about which medical specialization to go into, for God’s sake.

  If everything went according to plan, the Moonflower Bay palate cleanser would work on both broken hearts and subsumed selves. She surveyed Main Street as she got in the car. Most of the merchants had moonflowers growing in pots, and many of them had Little Free Libraries as well. It was almost too adorable.

  She just had to work, enjoy the lake and the beach, and not die of cute overload, and, by the end of her time here, she would be herself again.

  As if on cue, a text came through from her sister. I know it’s too soon, but I went into this open house. Fact finding. Only $1.4 million, lol.

  The text was accompanied by a picture of a typical Toronto redbrick semidetached house.

  Nora: Oh “only” 1.4, eh? How many bedrooms?

  Erin: Four! Three on the second floor for the boys and me and a fourth-floor master that could be your retreat.

  Nora: I told you I don’t need the master! I’ll be coming into this with less money than you will be.

  Erin: Yeah but I’ll be coming into this with more humans than you will. Anyway, you need privacy. What if you’re entertaining gentleman callers?

  Nora: Not happening.

  Erin: Oh, come on. It will happen eventually. Maybe we should look for a duplex so you don’t abandon me when you find a proper man.

  Nora: First things first. Let’s talk bedrooms AFTER we have a down payment together. Besides, we talked about this.

  They had. They’d agreed that if Erin ever remarried and wanted to expand her family, or if Nora’s domestic circumstances changed, they would sell the house and split the proceeds, each of them ideally walking away with a nice chunk of equity. That part had been important to Nora, despite the fact that she felt certain she was never dating again. But according to Erin and the therapy-industrial complex, eventually that feeling would go away.

  Erin: You and your logic. Sheesh. I gotta go pry the boys away from their screens. Night-night.

  Nora: Hang on, one more thing. How is Grandma?

  Erin: Pretty good! As stoic as ever, anyway. Her new fave topic is how she never liked Rufus.

  Nora smiled and, buoyed by the exchange with her sister, deleted Rufus’s texts without reading them and his voice mail without listening to it. Grandma was right. He was exhausting. Which, actually, was a relief. Being exhausted by Rufus, rather than hurt by him, felt like progress.

  All right. She’d had a lovely evening with new friends, and the clinic would open in two weeks.

  The reset button had been fully and firmly pressed.

  She typed the last text she would ever send Rufus. I don’t want to talk to you. Here’s my mailing address in Moonflower Bay. If there’s anyt
hing we *need* to talk about, legally or whatever, send me a letter. I’m blocking you now. Have a nice life.

  That should do it. They hadn’t been married. She had happily left him all the joint possessions they had accumulated. There was nothing left to bind them together. If she was overlooking something, and if it was important enough, he could send her a damn letter.

  When she got back home, she went out back, gingerly poked at the rotten deck with her toes until she found a chunk that seemed like it might not collapse under her weight, sat on it, and listened. The ad for this place had said you could hear the lake from the yard.

  And she could. Just barely, but yes, there was the sound of waves.

  She was alone, and it was okay.

  Chapter Four

  On Saturday, Nora hit the mall in nearby London to tackle the problem of household linens, and then she put in a long afternoon at the clinic. She was tired and a bit cranky when she got home, but the sight of Jake Ramsey’s truck parked in her driveway made her smile.

  And wasn’t that interesting?

  There was quite a racket coming from out back. She let herself into the house, dumped her shopping bags, and went straight to the sliding glass door that opened onto the backyard from what would have been the dining room had she had any actual dining furniture.

  He was facing away from her, doing something with a power tool she was pretty sure was some kind of saw. He didn’t notice her watching him through the door as he turned and laid a long, flat piece of wood into place.

  He was fixing her deck.

  Well, crap.

  Her throat tightened.

  She had spent too much time the last few days pondering the nature of loneliness. Which was the only reason she could think of to explain why this—a little bit of human kindness in the form of a guy building a deck—was going to make her cry.

  No. No, it was not. She allowed herself one sniff and looked for something to distract her.

  Jake was wearing grungy jeans and beat-up brown work boots.

  And he was not wearing a shirt.

  It was really hot out.

  So that made sense.

  Not wearing a shirt when you were working in the heat was a logical, normal thing that logical, normal people of the male variety did.

  She, however, was wearing what felt like half a gallon of Benjamin Moore Black Satin. She had spent the afternoon painting the front desk at the clinic. It had been a whim. The desk that had come with the practice had been a 1970s monstrosity made of fake wood paneling. She didn’t want to spend the money to replace it since she was only going to be in town for two years, but she had stopped in at Andersen’s Lakeside Hardware to ask if, theoretically, a person could paint over fake wood paneling. She’d had an odd encounter with the owner, an older man named Karl, who had assured her that yes, she could paint over the paneling and had amassed the necessary supplies but then refused to take payment for them.

  But something had gone wrong. The primer had seemed like it was going on funny, but then she’d thought, what the hell did she know about primer? So she’d plowed on. And who knew? Maybe the problem wasn’t the primer so much as the fact that she was spectacularly bad at painting. She’d tipped over the can at one point, and in her attempt to right it, her entire left arm had ended up covered.

  But whatever. She was standing in the kitchen staring at Jake, and it would be weird to keep doing that. It would also be weird to pretend she hadn’t seen him. So she slid open the door.

  He had returned to the saw or whatever it was, so his back was to her. His tanned, muscly back. A fact she noted with clinical detachment. Mostly.

  He turned on the tool, but he must have sensed her presence, because he stopped it right away, turned around, and took off the protective glasses he’d been wearing. Slid them up on his head, actually, like sunglasses. His hair looked like it had begun the day in a bun, but enough of it had fallen out that the glasses were actually holding a fair amount of hair off his face.

  “What are you doing?” she finally said, before her brain could catch up to what a stupid question that was. What do you think he’s doing? Practicing his ballroom dance moves?

  “Rebuilding this piece-of-crap deck.”

  “That was fast. When I asked if you could do my deck, I meant sometime in the not-too-distant future.”

  He shrugged. She kept waiting for him to follow that shrug with some words, but none came. “Okay, well, what do I owe you?”

  “Eh, it only took me a couple of hours.” He started putting his shirt on. She wanted to tell him not to do that, but that would be wildly inappropriate. Clinical detachment.

  “It only took you a couple of hours?” she echoed dumbly. In her imagination, which admittedly was based on nothing—she didn’t even watch home improvement shows on TV, as evidenced by her painting failure—building a deck was something you measured in days, not hours.

  “Yeah. I’m just throwing a quick cap over what’s here. It’s a shortcut. If you owned this place, I’d pull out the old rotten stuff and start from scratch.”

  “You would?”

  He squinted at her for a moment. Because she was acting like a simpleton, mindlessly repeating everything he said in the form of a question. Maybe he was onto something with all the silence. If you didn’t talk to people, it probably cut down on the frequency with which you had to listen to them say idiotic things.

  “Sorry. I guess I should have checked in with you before I started. I just had this pile of scrap wood”—he gestured at the deck, which looked like an honest-to-God deck and not at all like a pile of scrap wood—“and a free afternoon, and…” He shrugged.

  Ugh. She was being weird. Coming across as ungrateful. She was just so surprised. It was like she had wished aloud for a deck one day, and the next day, voilà! Deck!

  And for some reason, she was inherently skeptical when someone did her a favor. Instantly on the defensive. Wondering what the secret agenda was. How she was going to be made to pay later.

  Was that the kind of person she wanted to be?

  Okay. She smiled. Started over. “Jake. This is amazing. Thank you.”

  He smiled back. Which made her feel good.

  So she said some more. “Honestly, I was out-of-proportion disappointed about the deck situation. And it’s been a long day.” She held up her paint-splattered arms, and he chuckled. “So this is a lovely surprise.”

  “Well, give me five minutes to lay this last plank, and you can inaugurate your new deck.”

  She was imagining pouring herself a drink and doing exactly that. Should she ask him to join her? He’d rebuffed her last time. Well, what the hell. “I plan to—with a bourbon. You’re welcome to join me.”

  For a second she thought he was going to say yes, but then his face changed. Went blank, just like it had in his truck last weekend.

  He said the same words, too. “I can’t.”

  Jake had strong legs. He had strong everything, thanks to a combination of genetics, the physical aspect of both his jobs, and a penchant for canoeing, often with a portaging element. So he wasn’t used to his legs crapping out on him.

  But that was exactly what they started to do after he nailed the last board into place and walked across Nora’s new deck with the intention of reversing his response to her invitation. With every step he took, his legs felt shakier, but for some damn reason he kept moving them in her direction.

  His arms joined the weak brigade when he raised the right one to knock on the sliding glass door, which was open a crack. It sort of felt like it might keep floating up, farther than it needed to, up into the sky until he lost control of it altogether.

  “Come on in.”

  If his arms were floating up into space, Nora’s were firmly grounded—in the sink, where she was trying to wash off the black paint one of them had been coated with earlier.

  They both spoke at the same time. He said, “Thought I might take you up on that bourbon after all,” and she said, �
��Had a bit of a painting disaster at the clinic today.”

  Then they did it again. She said, “Great!” and he said, “What happened?”

  She laughed. If he’d thought before that she looked otherworldly, with her white-blond hair and her icy blue eyes, that laugh went a ways toward unraveling that interpretation. It was low and throaty and…earthy. Very much of this world.

  It was an interesting combination.

  “I’m glad. It’s been a long afternoon, and I could use the company. But I hate to say it, but I think I need to take a shower first. This”—she nodded toward the sink—“isn’t cutting it.”

  “You need soap.”

  “Which I don’t have out here, because I am a monster. But I do have it in the shower!” She looked around. For a towel, maybe? There didn’t seem to be any in the kitchen, but there was a roll of paper towels just out of her reach. He grabbed them, pulled off several, and handed them to her.

  “Thanks.” She dried her hands. “All I have is bourbon. I have bourbon but no dish towels. Imagine your stereotype of a gross bachelor pad, and this is it, except without the bachelor.” She lifted her arms. The black paint had smeared into a midtoned gray, and somehow it was all over both arms now as well as one of her cheeks.

  A laugh burbled up, but he stifled it—and when was the last time that had happened?

  “Anyway, bourbon is in the cupboard over the fridge, glasses to the right of the fridge—I have glasses!—so help yourself. I’ll be right back.”

  She disappeared down the hall, and he got down two glasses and poured a couple fingers of bourbon into each of them. Took a sip of his and took in the small, shabby open space that made up the dining-living area of the house. Or would have, had it contained any furniture.

  What the hell was he doing? He should just go. He had trout marinating at home, and the deck here was done. Although what she needed more than a deck was a plumber. He went over and examined a puddle of water at the foot of the dishwasher.